Psyche

The Psyche is Sartre’s name for the organized, virtual world of psychic objects through which impure reflection presents a person to themselves as an enduring being. It gathers the Ego, qualities, states, and acts into an apparent inner life, but this unity is not a substance hidden beneath experience: it is a shadow cast by the For-itself when reflection tries to know and possess what it is. The Psyche can orient action, yet its apparent solidity depends on a reflective objectivation that the living For-itself exceeds.

Constitution through impure reflection

Impure reflection tries to make the reflected consciousness into an object and then affirm an identity with it: the reflective consciousness would like to say that it is the object it has made of itself. Sartre calls this effort bad faith. The psychic object revealed in this movement is not the reflected consciousness’s original, temporal, non-substantial history. It is instead a shadow of being, a virtual object the reflective consciousness must be in order not to be it. The psychologist’s psychic fact belongs to this register: it is the reflected-on consciousness degraded into an in-itself, made to appear as a thing with a stable being.

The Psyche is the organized totality of these virtual, transcendent existents, accompanying impure reflection as its enduring correlate and serving as the natural object of psychological research. It appears as an in-itself underlying the For-itself’s temporalization, though its unity is made-to-be rather than independently self-sustaining. Pure reflection remains only quasi-knowledge; reflective knowledge can take the Psyche itself as an object, but that does not turn the Psyche into the original life of consciousness. Rather, it describes the objectivated shadow that impure reflection discloses.

The Ego, qualities, states, and acts

The Psyche includes the Ego, its states, qualities, and acts. In the double grammatical form of “I” and “Me,” the Ego represents the person as a transcendent psychic unity: a person can be considered an actual or theoretical subject, active or passive, a voluntary agent, or an object of judgments about value and responsibility. The Ego thus offers a person as a unified being for reflection, rather than simply naming the ongoing activity of consciousness.

Qualities are potential traits and dispositions that contribute to character and habit. They include being angry, industrious, jealous, ambitious, or sensual, as well as acquired traits registered through a person’s history: appearing older, tired, bitter, declining, or progressing; gaining assurance after success; or gradually acquiring the tastes, habits, and sexuality associated with prolonged illness. Such qualities are ways a person is characterized as having a durable disposition, not descriptions of a particular state that must be occurring at this moment.

States, by contrast, present themselves as actually existing and more contingent: something that happens to a person. Hate, love, jealousy, psycho-physiological illness as apprehended by the patient, exile, dishonor, triumph, and absence in relation to a definite person can all be lived as states. Sartre distinguishes a lasting disposition from an actual affective reality by contrasting yesterday’s anger, after which irascibility remains only as a latent propensity, with hatred following Pierre’s action. Even when attention turns elsewhere, that hatred can persist as an actual state. The boundary is not absolute: Pozzo di Borgo’s hatred of Napoleon the First is an affective and contingent relation that also became constitutive of Pozzo’s person.

Acts, too, acquire psychic being when reflection treats them as transcendent syntheses of means and ends. A boxer’s training, a scientist’s research, an artist’s work, and a politician’s election campaign are acts in this sense: they support and exceed the For-itself, which realizes itself through them. As psychic objects, they give an objective aspect to the person’s relation with the world. They do not merely name possibilities as the For-itself lives them; they present the person’s activity as an organized, transcendent achievement.

Reflection, action, and psychic objects

The psychic is disclosed only through a special class of cognitive acts: acts of the reflective For-itself. On the unreflective plane, the For-itself lives its possibilities non-thetically, and those possibilities disclose worldly situations and potentialities rather than psychic objects. An angry person may encounter an opponent’s face as calling for a punch; the world appears through the action toward which the situation is directed. The body serves as the means by which a world-potentiality is realized, as in a drink about to be consumed, help about to be given, or a dangerous animal about to be killed.

Reflection can then take the act itself as a virtual object. The relation to Pierre and the friendship for Pierre cannot, at the same moment and on the same level, both be objects of consciousness: the For-itself separates them. In unreflective consciousness it recedes before the worldly object and its potentialities; in reflection it is surpassed toward the virtual psychic object that the reflective consciousness has to be. Only pure reflective consciousness can disclose the reflected-on For-itself in its reality, while the Psyche consists of the virtual and transcendent existents that persist as the characteristic accompaniment of impure reflection.

These objects are virtual, but not abstract. Hate, exile, or systematic doubt may be immediately present “in person” to reflective consciousness; at other times a person may aim at them without finding them present. Recalling a dead love or an earlier intellectual atmosphere can yield an empty aim: concepts and literary description may be possible even while the thing itself is absent. A living love, too, can be known without being felt during intermittent periods. The love becomes fully apprehensible only in a particular reflective relation—for example, when friendship for Pierre is grasped through sympathy that has itself become the reflected-on object. Qualities, states, and acts become present in this way as objectivations, shadows cast onto the in-itself.

Psychic duration and practical consequences

When reflective consciousness is constituted as consciousness of duration, psychic duration appears alongside it. This is a virtual projection of original temporality into the in-itself, a phantom flow that accompanies the For-itself’s ekstatic temporalization when reflection apprehends it. It disappears if the For-itself remains unreflective or if impure reflection purifies itself. Psychic time is the connected bringing together of temporal objects; unlike original temporality, which temporalizes itself, psychic time is. Its future can be represented only as a past that will follow the present past, so that an empty before-and-after is fixed into an order among objects.

This duration must continually be made-to-be. It oscillates between juxtaposed multiplicity and the cohesion of the For-itself’s ekstatic temporality: its “nows” have been and remain in assigned places, yet they influence one another at a distance as parts of a whole. Sartre compares this magic duration to Bergson’s philosophy. Once impure reflection seeks to determine the being a person is, a psychic world appears within this phantom temporality: ideal in one respect, but present insofar as it is made-to-be and disclosed to consciousness. It is the person’s shadow, what appears when the person tries to see themselves.

Although virtual, the psychic world can function as a real situation in which the For-itself determines itself. Someone may avoid visiting a person because of antipathy, choose an action with hate or love in view, or refuse to discuss politics because they know their quick temper could lead to irritation. Psychic objects thus have consequences without becoming the ultimate source of action: they furnish reflective descriptions and considerations through which a person takes up a situation. In this inner temporality, the For-itself seems almost to give itself an outside, as though it could look upon itself from beyond; that outside remains virtual here, while being-for-others will realize the suggestion of an external view.